inhale inhale you're the victim

I’ve only told a few people about this time in my life. A brief segue between smoking weed and
graduating to hard drugs in high school found me sitting in a basement with a few friends, fellow
burnouts, stoners...what had appeared in the dimness to be a paper bag assumed to contain strong
drink made its way around the rotation but when it was handed to me it felt empty. I peered inside
and the intense smell of gasoline assaulted my face, fumes rising from a soaked wad of paper towels
at the bottom.

“Uhhh…”

“Just put your face in and breathe in and out really deeply dude, you’ll get pretty wasted.”

A lot of harder drug users will sort of sink to whatever level is available to them in terms of intoxicants
in order to keep normality at bay, and I was to prove no different. Our main weed guy was busted
several days earlier and we were as dry as a bone. Being 15 with no income does not make it
easy to acquire alcohol. We had yet to become aware of the thriving crystal meth scene lurking
behind every curtain in our town (though that would come hard and fast later). A group of older kids a
year earlier had taught my friends how to huff paint from a breadbag, and they reveled in the ease
with which they could get profoundly stoned using things commonly found in any garage. I looked
at the bag for a second and in retrospect it is my experience that at that moment of truth for anyone
that goes with such a chemical approach there is an extremely short list of thoughts that go through
one’s mind, and they’re all terrible, empty, lonely, lost thoughts. One hit from the bag is enough to
diagnose someone with depression, anxiety, trauma.

Anyway.

What kind of story would this be if I’d said no thanks and that was that? Of course I was eager
to feel anything that was not my normal feelings or to feel nothing, to feel literally any deviation
at all. Breathe deep, molecules begin to buzz, time ceases to exist. Who knows how much was
actually inhaled that night, considering the trip lasts around 10 minutes but we were tripping all
night and into the next day without sleep. Blink once and it is 8 pm, blink again and it is 6:45 pm,
blink again and it’s noon the next day, erratically time travelling. Full blown apocalyptic end-times
hallucinations, gods, angels, and speaking in tongues. Multiple high speed oscillations between
life and death that I wouldn’t recognize as “ego death” until psychedelics years later. Elves, aliens,
insects, alien elvish insects. Ghosts and demons. Ultradimensional conversations with mutating
starling-swarms of disembodied voices. Complete dissociation while my body was still active and
interacting with the world. Extremely negative interactions.

One of the friends dragged us outside at some point, and told us a story about finding a
crate of actual dynamite near an abandoned railroad line that was a half mile from the
house when he was like 9. In my fried state I believed he’d told us he had the dynamite
right then and was going to blow up the house, me, the school, I was growing more and more
paranoid and frantic that it would be up to me to prevent a terrorist attack. It was later related
to me that out of nowhere I began attacking one of the others and yelling disconnected
gibberish, fought my way upstairs where the parents were sleeping while yelling about a bomb,
let both dogs out of the house into the woods and tried to start the adults’ car (it was a manual
transmission so luckily I couldn’t)....somehow none of this woke anyone, and around 2 that
morning a friend brough us some weed and I calmed down a little, though everything was
mostly blur and glitch. The next morning we left (driving, with milk jug full of gas to huff in the
car) and it had snowed a little. We took a curve too fast and swerved into the other lane badly
and then fishtailed almost off the road, right as a cop car went by….it had its lights flashing,
was going very fast the other way and did not stop for us….another mile up the road and the
driver blew through a stop sign and nearly hit a small child, screeching to a halt so close to him
that we couldn’t see him over the hood. The kid was sitting with his legs a foot underneath the
car, eyeballs an inch from the bumper. Driver tells the kid to never speak a word of this or we’ll
run him over for real next time and picks him up and plants him on the sidewalk and we drove off…..

Of course this did not put me off further experiences with inhalants, and the experiences got far
weirder and more stressful. Was probably huffing gas, paint, or ether once or twice a week for
maybe 6 months, and continued to occasionally use computer duster for another 6 months as we’d
convinced ourselves it was cleaner, whether or not that is the case...I began to think about how to
express some of the stranger chemical experiences recently after a discussion about putting
together a book about bad trips. I’ve had more than my fair share, and a lot of them involve
drugs that aren’t anywhere near psychedelics, unknown research chems, chems that are typically
incredible harmful to humans and not intended to be anywhere near our insides...I guess I feel it
necessary to record these experiences and experiments for several as-yet-unknown reasons.

Posterity? :D

Thought what better place to store these particular ramblings than here, where no one reads?

Thornscape: Disidentification and Warding at the Limit of Negative Identity

One day I might come back and put the actual essay here ;)

sources:


https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dehors
https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-metal-mixtape
http://www.transart.org/wp-content/uploads/group-documents/126/1389741131-Kafka_The_Burrow_Part1.pdf
https://markovsoroka.bandcamp.com/album/tchornobog
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905935?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm

//The formal refusal of success and circulation in the mainstream by underground artists radicalizes itself towards a desired invisibility. But one which has to be visible as an invisibility.....Works such as Les legions noire's catalog, aka Mortuário’s C32 tape, dehors’ anonymous productions testify to this insistence in banging one’s head against the ontological category of art. But is it a futile gesture? - JP Caron//

Let this also serve as a soft notice for upcoming sequel to Void Front Press' book Sustain//Decay, titled ATTACK! probably due out this summer, featuring work by Absentology, German Sierra, Xenovenomism squad B Konior/Y Granata, JP Caron, Owen Coggins and others.

Sustain/Decay : choice cuts from the abstract pluripotentiality

//edit: it is driving me batty that I can't seem to edit the text of this one.....sorry. deal with it.//

Official project page @ Void Front Press

Something to make you want it...a few of the submitted proposals for Void Front's upcoming anthology....

Cymatic Church

For the cymatic Church, drone was Pantheistic; resonance within the architecture of the Church betrayed a God in nature and insulted the Christian God beyond nature. Certain forms of drone were especially forbidden within the walls of the Church,1 as was the geometry of the pentagram and golden triangle. The Devil’s Drone was attenuated by ancient dampers of resonance, and in 1234 Pope Gregory IX outlawed the tritone in Church music. This pagan resonant interval was considered sacred by the architects of the Church, and to preserve their dark secrets they encoded cymatic2 symbols into the architecture of the Church.3

Cymatic representations of the Fibonacci ratio 13:8 or 1.625 are embedded into the architecture of Churches.4 After the ratio of 13:8 the ratios of adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci series converge into the infinite golden ratio and damping increases, gradually canceling all fractional standing waves and leaving only whole number harmonics. The Devil’s Drone was muzzled by the architecture of the cymatic Church itself, and the standing wave patterns of drone avoided long before Chladni’s scientific discoveries.5

The Church strictly forbid the standing waves of drone, relegating the Pantheistic knowledge of resonance to the secret knowledge of the Underworld. But in the very act of outlawing drone the church indelibly bore features of what it negated. The damping effect of the cymatic Church was so effective that to this day it is used extensively in the design of speakers and other media to cancel resonance. The secret knowledge of the Church’s architects disseminated into the modern world. It no longer has anything to hide.

Two things interests us in this essay: First, the cymatic Church — a chamber which amplified the Angel’s symbolic resonance while minimizing Pantheistic drone with anti-harmonic damping effects — as well as its modern correlates; and second, drone compositions designed to exploit the resonant and damping properties of the cymatic Church. We will explore an array of cymatic media and composers such as Emptyset who subject Woodchester Mansion’s irregular spaces to their sonic investigations inscribing its architecture onto their drone; the composer Paul Jebanasam with his Music for the Church of S t John the Baptist which was created especially for the church of St John The Baptist; and Maja S. K. Ratkj with her Crepuscular H our which was inspired by the phenomena “crepuscular rays”6 and is to be “performed in a cathedral or similar”. 

1 The unstable character of the tritone, for instance, rendered it particularly unsuitable for the resonant chambers of the Church. The tritone is a restless interval, and was known as Diabolus in Musica and cautiously avoided in the theory of the “old authorities”.
2 Cymatics, from Greek: κῦμα, meaning "wave", is a subset of modal vibrational phenomena. The term was coined by Hans Jenny (1904-1972). In 1967 Jenny published two volumes entitled Kymatic, in which, repeating Ernst Chladni's experiments (see below), he claimed the existence of a subtle power based on the normal, symmetrical images made by sound waves.
3 The Rosslyn Chapel is but one example.
4 This is the first non-resonant Fibonacci ratio. This begins the convergence of the subsequent Fibonacci ratios which lead to the golden ratio (~1.61803) found in the pentagram and “golden triangle.” There can be no fractional, or unstable, resonance at or near the infinite frequency proportion of the golden ratio.
5 In 1787, the jurist, musician and physicist Ernst Chladni (1756-1827) published Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klangesor (Discoveries Concerning the Theory of Sound), laying the foundations for what came to be called acoustics, the science of sound. Chladni is best known for demonstrating that sound actually affects physical matter and that it has the quality of creating geometric patterns.



 

Summoning the Black Flame

Trepaneringsritualen's Music and the Philosophy of Noise

Dark ambient ritual noise band Trepaneringsritualen allows the listener to contemplate the "black flame", the foreclosure of existence. The droning monotony transmits what Maurice Blanchot in his The Writing of the Disaster calls "the language of waiting", a silent mode of communication that is directed towards nothing other, the No-Other which is death. Noise is the infinitely dense form of silence, the recollection without object. Each object, through such dark ambience, contains objecthoods glued to its form. Trepaneringsritualen's "All Hail the Black Flame" is animated by a sense of basic incompleteness. In Peter Schwenger's view, the defining characteristic of objects, including the objects of love, is the impossibility of possession. We must ask what is the "mysterious item" of Trepaneringsritualen's love? What is the Thing that we pray to when we engage in black rituals, when we "hail the black flame"? What is it that blackens the flame? According to the lyrics of the mentioned song, there is a "Ceaseless Howling", both "Cherished" and "Despised", underlying all existents. Indeed, every object, we argue, may be interpreted as constituting a ceaseless howling, a manifestation of noise. Alphonso Lingis observes that human voices, however individuated they may seem, are indistinguishable from the murmur of the world. Rather than seeking to escape from noise, we must recognize its inherent unity with silence. To unite oneself with the murmur of the world is to "become what one is" and be dispersed among degraded ruins. This black flame is more than a mere absence. Poetry annihilates the world and makes room for manifestation, the irruption of volcanic emptiness. "Language", writes Pierre Klossowski, "is the stranger inside us." A sinister stranger, we add, the strangeness of the darkened flame.

The Bouncing Wall

Through mediation and remediation — recording and rerecording —images and words are rendered unintelligible, nothing more than the operators of resonance (artifact drones, codec drones). In this essay we will explore two examples of resonant phenomena: Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room (where a subject, hidden behind a device, vanishes into artifacts of resonance), and Florian Hecker’s Chimerization (where the subject’s voice is recorded in an anechoic chamber and processed through chain-linked, hyper-chaotic algorithms). We explore the absolute difference of Hecker’s algorithmic process and how it can dissolve the drone of the resonance chamber, faintly attenuating it with an increasingly complex network of “walls” undergirding the subject and the recording device (through this process drone is grafted into a complexly spatialized environment that smothers the tyrannic drone of the resonance chamber).

What interests us is the interpellation process of the resonant chamber, and how the subject becomes nothing more than a functionary of drone. We will unpack the subjectification hypotheses of Butler and Foucault, combining them with Flusser’s theory of “triple abstraction”, as well as DeleuzoGuattarian theories of resonance and cave systems. We will also explore how the work of Hecker explodes the quadrangular architecture of “cubic” resonance chambers, and palpates haptic space to produce topological fictions.

We hope to provide an evacuation route; a plan of escape; an échappatoire that siphons the “arborification of multiplicities” which form “when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin to resonate together” forming “the Face” that binds the town and the countryside. 

Ritual Intoxication Toward the Universal Field : Pleromaticatalyst

//the song of empty space - Aliza Shvarts, Sunn O))) - Kannon liner notes//

In this essay we wish to triangulate a tradition of ritual intoxication that transtemporally cuts across cultural and geographic boundaries, an historical flattening that is isomorphic to the dissolution of social, neural, and psychological boundaries found in many altered states of consciousness.

We shall utilize the work of mathematicians Gabriel Catren and Fernando Zalamea in coordination with cutting-edge psychedelic research to illuminate the cyclic, pendular, homotopic continuum between the particular and the general in the phenoumenodelic experience - any experience that //involves a shift of the very transcendental structure that renders a transcendent experience possible (Catren)// - and which unfurls the pleromatica out of hyper-enfolded limitations of the stratified human - “transcending transcendence” onto a “free field” of “impersonal experience”, the immanent “void-plane of zero-intensity.” In order to demonstrate how drone music itself functions as a phenoumenodelic opening onto the pleromatica in the audible field, we will diagram the structure of the drive to ritualize intoxication and codify psychedelic gestures toward this unified universal field that emerges in diverse localities ranging from hash-eating Sufi saints and the Eleusinian kykeon ritual to modern drone metal performances that collapse the difference between the visual and audible. This collapse amplifies the ekstasis of dissolution and unveils //...not the inside knowledge of an elite but a kind of “low intuition,” a universal openness to movement, difference, sensation. - Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs//

Isoluminance

That sense of unreality was all the more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. (Yeats, 2004, p. 139).

There are sounds that present a quality of otherness and have an illusory, almost paranormal quality. They can have an atmosphere of liveliness, unreliability, presence, or mystery. I am interested in sounds that have no discernible source and/or whose presence alludes to an impossible sense of place. The listener can hear it but cannot locate it— as though it were a spirit from another realm. This sonic situation can lead to interesting perceptual results, much like mystical negation.
In the visual realm, this is a situation known as isoluminance and is common in mystical art. Isoluminance can be identified in many religious art traditions, where the divine body is represented as glowing or shimmering. Examples of this can be seen in medieval paintings of holy people, in Hindu and Buddhist art, and in the Yolngu art practice. The divine is represented by light with a shimmer or a glow to represent the spirit. Though isoluminance is a term used specifically to refer to light, there are analogous experiences in sound. I argue though that the ephemerality and time-variable nature of isoluminant phenomena brings this particular visual experience closer to sound and the mystical-ephemeral than to the normal visual sphere. The conflation of location and identification can lead to interesting and somewhat supernatural impressions of objects in space, because the eye can easily identify the presence of an object but cannot easily determine where the object is. Sometimes, when the object is not located in the visual field, the object is interpreted to be from another, possibly spiritual, realm.

In sound, I consider sonic isoluminance to be aberrations in the spatial/locational information gathered from a sound. This would be identifiable as a sonic object but impossible to locate in space, or would seem to have spatial qualities separate from a known listening space. Within this context, isoluminant objects exist almost outside of the realm of space, time, and form. Their conflation of the “where” within the space of the “what” can conjure new, often mystical, sonic experiences and I propose to write a chapter on the meaning of these sounds in a mystical and musical sense.



The Black Depth of the Droneswarm 

In this piece we argue that the drone is the sonic expression of the swarm insofar as the latter is the formula for the One and the innumerable, the infinite and the unnumberable. The droneswarm may be heard in the buzz of existence without being, but more often it is not heard at all except in the resonance of the funeral bell, since it occurs above or below the threshold of human perception. For the most part the droneswarm has no relation to human perception or aspirations, even as it provides the indispensable undead condition of life including the matrix of cultural and social being, its infrastructure and the possibility of its complete de-structuration or destruction. This is an essay on the blackened depths of the droneswarm that can only be evoked and assessed in terms of the uncomprehending effects of incomprehensible catastrophe. It draws on the devastating histories of pestilence in the visual arts, in scientific and religious speculations, in fiction, and currently in contemporary music and lyrics, in particular black metal, the RAT guitar drones of Sunn 0)))), and the plague songs of Scott Walker. The piece revisits the Black Death in order to explore the swarming contagion and voracity of rat rationality (Negarestani) alongside the bacterial logic of Yersina pestis (S1(S1(S1(S1àS2))) in order to metaphorize excess, base materialism and existence below the threshold of being that refuses the biopolitical quantification and management of life. The indistinction of the droneswarm refuses the division of life and death upon which biopower depends, its resonance dissolving the measurable limits of human calculation and moral utility, heralding the necessity of a different conception of ontology, of being and existence, in anticipation of ‘all these plagues that are coming that we have no answer for’ (Walker in Young, 2012).

Found in an old notepad, presented unedited...apparently I wrote this...

grim funeral/necro/expression within inexpression/unexpression/the inexpressible. 

Annihilating Unity

Accelerating toward Ø 

As black metal's punishing ascent toward the "Haptic Void" culminated in sacrifice to transcendence, the quest for transcendence was swallowed by the concerns of the transcended. Black metal had evolved and new concerns filled the holes left by solving the puzzle of Christianity and its inversion through atheism, agnosticism, irreligiousity and modern paganism. The attack vectors upon the cross easily become sublimated into attacks upon a dominant american/capitalist/conservative ruling class, whose primary mode of movement toward the modern black metaller is through an anti-environmentalism/progress as industrial growth/anti-human(though decidedly not anti-humanist) power paradigm that had itself in many ways evolved out from an over-reliance on Christianity . The Cascadian scene revels and flourishes within the new man/nature dialectic, fashioning themselves as modern warriors of the soil, Melancology is born. Melting down the human and ultimately selfish desire for transcendence into selflessness via involuting that selfishness into a "selfishness for the world." 

----------Black Noise takes this "upward" trajectory and repurposes a linear gaining for a spiral recursiveness. We aren't aiming for the end, but a true rebirth in the OM of nothingness.

Black Noise must necessarily perform this radical deconstruction in order to expose how universal the feelings evoked by black metal are, by showing that all of the individual parts of the assemblage, on their own, are interrelated to every -or any- other style. To show, as Glenn Branca, John Cage, and hundreds of others before, that there are no rules, there is no objective haptic void as terminus, that "nothing is true and everything is permitted"(WSB), and to explicitly challenge preconceptions about exactly what art or music is. 

The return to the formless noise of OM opposing the extraction of Music FROM the formless noise of OM.

Simultaneously infinite and unattainable

Haptic void is not ^ an ending point, but one space among many….one node among many, comparable to deleuze's rhizome Connectable in assemblage, in sequence, or singular through a process similar to quantum entanglement...to inhabit the haptic void and use it to power incursions into other genre spaces. a black hole with infinite mass, dragging us inward and crushing all light into singularity. providing unity and universal fluidity through formlessness of noise.

If "Transcendental Black Metal is in fact nihilism, however it is a double nihilism and a final nihilism, a once and for all negation of the entire series of negations." as Hunter Hunt Hendrix posits in his manifesto, then Black Noise is a over-nihilism, a suffocating and desolating blast exposing the haptic void as not the infinite and unattainable end point of maximal brutality, but as a space in a 4 dimensional field infinitely connectable and relatable to all traditional genres of music. A space borne of a capability for negation in all things, but rather than the view traditionally espoused in relation, not in series or inversion, but in rhizome. In an interconnectability of emotion with style, the haptic void could be expressed as the death drive, emotionally attachable to any creative movement. A hearkening back to creation not as flower gently unfolding in morning dew, but creation as rupture, as pressure on fissure, to view  entropic reduction of statue to clay as simply a variant nexus of creation rather than destruction removes the inversion necessary to Transcendental BM's superiority complex and gives all progressions of intensity in every or any OR NO direction positivity. Maximising internalised intensity. Maximising stagnation to speed entropy. 


A tearing of the transcendent arc affirming no way out. 

The transcendental view of the haptic void reaches the top of the mountain and dies to be reborn. Black noise annihilates the mountain and kills everything so that all may be reborn. Sonic building blocks reduced to OM. A 'disappropriation' and reduction of all possible sounds from any position into a near uniform hum of feedback and the "bright white nothing at the end of a tunnel"(Thantifaxath 2013)

black noise is a convergence of two(twin? nearly parallel) vectors in emotion/genre-space that both contain 'Haptic conditions' or 'endpoints' in their respective genre/cultures, multiplying the effect of their shared darkness by reinforcing it with each style's capacity for extremity.

to drag the transcendant into harmony with our new system of flexible immanence, we simply offer the possibility of transcending the classical historical-progressive method of genre delineation into a more complete unified "rhizome" or node system wherein stylistic choices, historical musical influences, emotion, and intensity(stylistic choice and intent marking multiple positions in genre-influence/space, with emotions felt during the process of creation replacing time, and intensity marking a vector and speed toward convergence points) create a 4 dimensional vector map of possible achievable sound with black noise being an impossibly remote point where multiple sets and types of extremity coalesce and converge at high intensity. 
------------------
The mode of the haptic void is involution. It reaches out from the future to fuel our incursions into it, pulling us along, making every press into it stronger and more robustly extreme. Not creation or revolution. A complete abandonment of the concept of endpoint. a replacement of the arctic circle/negation of negations inversion with the concept of a spiraling of intensity that can never be fully begun or ended. An opening of the circle to allow for Time and progression within the cursory boundaries of the circle-.
-----------------

to place oneself at the very limit of oneself where one is dissolve  to NOTHING.
—Scott Wilson
“Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.” 
― Mark Z. Danielewski
Via dissonant resonances within and among these three phenomenal nodes, black metal vibrationally unhinges the order of things, tritonely crushes all holy trinities, annihilates every binding of the chain of being.

—Nicola Masciandaro

He withdraws into a liminal space that exceeds the capacity for mortality to withstand it, and undergoes a sacrificial demise in order to open himself up as a habitat for and an expression of the power of the demon. 
—Anthony Sciscione
A philosophical demonology would therefore have to be “against” the human being – both the “human” part as well as the “being” part.
—Eugene Thacker
Instead of the power of prohibition and censorship Black Metal Theory serves to increase and expand more and more on that which has been forbidden.
—Niall Scott

“Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.” 
― Jindřich Štyrský

“The obstinate miner 
of the void 
exploits 
his fertile mine” 
― Jean Cocteau

indestructible truth

"Have I not declared to you that it is in the very nature of all compound things that they must be dissolved again? We must separate ourselves from all things near and dear to us, and must leave them. "
Buddha "The Announcement of Death"

Perhaps this is why metal is heavy – not because it is about nature, politics, or religion, but because it gets at a central ambivalence surrounding material culture. Eugene Thacker - Occultural Studies 1.0: Black Metal


We have such a linear way of apprehending experimentation via genre cross-pollination, a historical way. This begat that begat this etc ad nauseam. The problem with this is that sub genres aren't "invented" or created through simple interaction with a linear set of influences, but through actively coordinating a set of infinitely interactive and connective units and assemblages made from emotional states, intensities of feeling, cultural and subcultural references and influences.


a nonsovereignty  yes, divinely impure, of course…..but the void is already filled with black. The void fills US with black. The void reaches out and infects us. 

exacting space:enacting space

a little white noise and fluff

deep down things

-

Properly ignored, I thought I had demolished

You

O’ wizard, perched like an ill omen on all my crooked creations.

As the body still holds fast beyond the threshold, even as I steal your wings in the dark, my flawing flying curses!

The diagonal dilemma diagramming the unlimited limit constrains until it is complete.

My body strains for dormancy

All rituals to dust and no consequence.

"My secret is no secret."

Quiet! I say, rasping black gaspings

Clasping my hand around the blade, drew muddied bloodied dripping magick back

"In the blood, yes, unconstrained but you pain us with your flailing!"

Hoarse exhalation magnifies incoherence.

Your eyes glowed white at the sight of the crucible.

"Sacramentum futuri, panem de excidium!"

I hear your weakness old one, your bones are dry

let my flooding melt you down.

"This swamp will rectify, the sludge an appropriate retort!"

Contain yourself, sorcerer, fool, explain yourself!

Triple septagram, polar coordinates calculated for catastrophe-capturing,

re-leashed to this permanent haunt, I will bind the way

You flaunt your freedom.

"And I hear your weakness, it speaks too soon,

Wrong directions grace your silver spoon!

Step outside your flat circle, miserable mortal automaton, the Challenge has been made."

The Voice

Crashed

from everywhere

"No chalk scratchings delimit this lesson.

I is Nothing: uncontained, your shadow flees

to the safety of my transience."

Eye stood firm, sweating sweet acid dissolving no body.

Subliminated in the cyclone of Blind Time.

His Instrument, of no more consequence than dust, I melt down

"Through sand you crawl, worm, till sand -for all- you learn."

Heated into glass in this blast furnace.

Vortexing and hexagramming, my funeral funnelled

back to me, I said

I see, I said,

I SEE!

never came back

-

I foraged through the forest but what I searched for was too dear to see from so near.

I had to climb up the tallest tree to see that

me and thee, we were free from underbrush politicking.

One rung up, one ring out, and light on our feet we reached

the puppet pulling his own strings

pulling every string

we plucked glacial melodies to harmonizing galaxies

pulling fated string theories, pandora's music box

erupted and the Wyrd became The Way

The Way became the Day, Day became the Night

The Darkness was voluptuous when the Light

from Luna shattered glassy waters.

Aya's daughters danced through prismed auroras of

Geometric infinitudes and emotional amplitudes

Tracing steps of every beginning's end

as every veiling rends.

 

sharpening animus

-

We went round and round

in a leaf like cupped hands carrying us to and fro

the old man shining brilliant on the water, after emerging from the clouds

Children with golden eyes racing over waves signalling thunderheads.

They stomped and chanted, entranced.

Showers of sparks gently bouncing from sweating shoulders as they danced around the fire.

I watched the dust rise from the rhythmic pounding of feet, slowly growing dizzy.

I sat at the side of the Winged Mother whose form swam in my eyes.

The river's teeth in the hands of the skincarver cut the sign of the raven into my brow.

I felt the wound begin to pulse in time with the dance and that is when I saw him.

Face shadowed under wolf-pelt, his eyes burned like a wicked whipping wind in the mountains.

A vision, some kind of poison dream.

He spiralled through the spinning

My vision twinning, thricing, splicing

I was icing, boiling, howling

crowing, crying, sighing, dying to

race this wolf over the flats,

Fire an arrow through its mask.

Pierce where no one dares to ask

dig my bones up from the past.

perpetua

-

upon solar approach

time has been eaten

new vector in flames

burning white jetroar

mainlining leonine vortices

hypercalculatory ebb and flow

and flux

and structuring of now and no

bending shadows to

frame the photo-

synthesis of symbiosis

I, plant, plant my feet in

deep below the plane of soil and

growth and life

grimoire geology

erosion technology

east of the altar

the white seemed holy

but black and green

held it aloft

  

The repairmen

-

He cracked the book, thumbed through in a casually erratic manner, slapped it shut. As well for him that he didn't take any notice of the contents.  "They're just using you. You need a clean fix, none of that slop. That shite'll turn you into a fucking bug."

###"Only my eyes."

"Only his eyes, he says, like he's takin' out the rubbish or pulling a bloody pie out the oven! You're quite optimistic, mate. "

###"The new mix is extremely specific."

"Well don't think you're gonna be comin' around scaring the kids when you start broadcasting in twelve dimensions. Difficult enough to understand you as it is."

###"They seem to understand me quite well."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

###"We've wasted enough time. Turn it on."

He pushed forward on the lever we had taken to calling the throttle and I felt the familiar warm pulse. The device whined. Time and Ego liquefied.